Saturday, 23 June 2012

The bullied bus monitor

That youtube video about the school bus monitor who was video-taped being bullied and tormented by young boys is really an inside look at what happens every schoolday for many of our youth. In a school system depleted of "culture" and social values - and I mean here discussion and discourse on the narrative, parable, socialization, psychologically-insightful literature about who we are and what we can become - the school bully and his/her victims are the default culture. The Lord of the Flies.

Stephen Harper is the end-result of victimhood (the initiate); Peter Mackay is the bully (the handler). In fact, the whole CPC culture is the unexamined life resulting from that school system: unvoiced and unquestioned suggestion that the whole country is culpable somehow in this or that perversion and/or corruption and/or outrage is how the system works. Might is right. Black and white. Good and evil. Us and them.

The social narrative provides not only role models for us to try and emulate, to inspire us, it also provides that imagined space for action and assessment of consequences. The narrative is a profound source of language and communication. Catch 22; "pulling a Yeltsin"*...

*when one ultimately saves someone whom one has fought against for so long (remember the coup attempt against Gorbachev, centuries ago)

The narrative need not be old and is in fact most potent in contemporary media, but its relevancy is archetypal. At the meta level, the youtube video is itself a perfect example of the social narrative. The quality of CPC and the political discourse in general on the one hand and people like Breivik, Maggota, that security guard killer from Edmonton, on the other are all symptoms of a society of universalism/internationalism (in direct opposition to "constitutionalism") gone amok.

Religion and ideology (corporations) cannot and do not themselves create equality and justice - these messy little things are totally beyond their purview. Equality and justice are results of hard work and scrapes and cuts, not ready-made and packaged consumer products but cultivated characteristics of the human soul.

The cleaning up or outright censorship of literature (fiction and non-fiction) and fairy-tales/legends (as age-appropriate or psychologically damaging) creates these types of personalities. Abe Lincoln is a great historical figure (whether one is for or against, worts and all) and his story is compelling examination of human possibilities in and of itself. Abe Lincoln the vampire slayer is a devolution, like some of the historical stuff that issues from Harper's mouth - remember NDP and Hitler, Canada never having been a colonial empirialist... that Canada is an energy-superpower... war of 1812... the anniversary of repatriation of the Canadian constitution...

Thoughlessness goes hand-in-hand with sparknotes history and unchecked ego-wishing. This is sociopathy writ large.